When the War Was Over (85 page)

Pol Pot was a guerrilla ruler once again. Vietnam's economy fell apart, and at the end of 1979 the regime was forced to institute liberal reforms that completely undid the “socialism” effort enforced in the spring of 1978, in preparation for the war. Vietnamese children also joined the ranks of the world's most vulnerable victims, with alarming rates of malnutrition and disease.

It was time for another attempt to bring peace to Cambodia.

In February 1979, after the United Nations had condemned Vietnam for invading Cambodia and accorded Cambodia's seat at the UN to the exiled government of the Khmer Rouge, the Soviet Union's Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked Igor Rogachev, its Southeast Asia director, to travel to Cambodia and survey the landscape. Rogachev was already in Vietnam to monitor the invasion and to figure out why international opinion had gone entirely against what he and other Soviet diplomats considered a clear case of good triumphing over evil. The Vietnamese had gotten rid of a vile government. They had liberated Cambodia. They deserved praise, not condemnation.

It didn't help that the Vietnamese ambassador had lied at the UN and claimed that Cambodians had overthrown Pol Pot without the help of the Vietnamese army. Rogachev had been briefed by the top Vietnamese military and knew that the invasion was entirely a Vietnamese operation and had yet to be completed. They said the problems they faced were worse than they had expected, and they would be hard-pressed to put together something resembling a Cambodian government. Rogachev had duly reported all that he was told, and now Moscow wanted him to go inside the country and provide a firsthand account of the damage in this newest Asian country to join the Soviet orbit.

For the Soviet Union, Cambodia was something of a black hole. Since the 1930s Vietnam's communists had been its real ally in the region. The Soviets had such weak political ties to Cambodia that at pivotal moments in modern history they had passed up the chance to influence the country. In 1970, when Prince Sihanouk found himself in Moscow still in shock from a coup d'état, the Soviets put him on an airplane and sent him off to Beijing, telling him that the Chinese would be the logical source of support. Through the 1970–1975 Cambodian War, the Soviets refused to shut down their embassy in Phnom Penh even though they were among the chief champions of the communists in the Indochina conflicts. When they won their war, the Khmer Rouge threw out the Soviet diplomats with particular disdain. And as the Khmer Rouge proved themselves more Stalinist than the Russians and more Maoist than the
Chinese, the Soviets felt relieved to be rid of that volatile communist country whose penchant for self-destruction had become all too obvious.

Now, however, the Soviet Union was responsible for Cambodia. The friendship treaty it had signed four months earlier with Vietnam made it the de facto guarantor of Vietnam in all of its military confrontations. And that made Igor Rogachev the de facto Soviet diplomatic overseer of the occupation.

At forty-seven years of age, Rogachev had a solid reputation as a Chinese scholar and an accomplished diplomat. In his current job he was responsible for Southeast Asia but he remained one of the leading Sinologists in the Soviet foreign ministry. The son of the former director of Chinese studies at Moscow University, Igor Rogachev had grown up as one of the anointed children of the Soviet Union. His was a home of privilege, open to influences beyond the suffocating confines of average Soviet life. Through his father Rogachev grew up with an appreciation for China and Asia, setting him apart naturally from his other foreign ministry colleagues who, like most Soviets, looked toward Europe. His birthright also included a nearly automatic position in the foreign ministry where he would be assured of the greatest luxury of all—travel. His horizons would never be restricted. Once he was in the diplomatic service, Rogachev's language skills were immediately appreciated. His spoken Chinese was “so exceptional, so beautiful,” as one colleague put it, that he was the favored interpreter of several Soviet and Chinese leaders. His diplomatic acumen, moreover, gave him special status since he saw the world through Asian more than European eyes.

His first posting had been to Beijing, from 1956 to 1961, just before the full rupture of Sino-Soviet relations. Later he spent four years in Washington tracking the growing friendship between the United States and China, and becoming acquainted with American Sinologists. “I was the first Soviet sent as a ‘China watcher' to Washington. It was something special,” he said. “That was the time of the American flirtation with China—Ping-Pong diplomacy and all that.”

He was surprised at the friends he was able to make in Washington, including China-born Stapleton Roy, who later became one of America's leading ambassadors in Asia. “He is a very close friend. I took part in his wedding,” said Rogachev. For his part, Roy felt Rogachev was easier to get to know than most foreign diplomats, either European or Soviet, communist or not. “It's funny,” Roy said, “but he let me get to know him so well that I can predict what he will think and I'm usually right. He was that open in his own, quiet way.”

That innate self-confidence helped Rogachev weather the frustrations of the 1970s. To be a Sinologist in the Soviet foreign ministry then was as frustrating as being one in the State Department in the 1950s. In both cases, China was considered the enemy, and those scholars who understood China and tried to explain its importance had to worry about appearing to take China's side against their own governments. But colleagues say Rogachev never behaved as if he felt hampered by the narrow path he had to follow to improve relations with China. On the contrary, they say he acted as if he had plenty of time to win over skeptics.

“He is noted for his unorthodox thinking, but also for his gentle very diplomatic manners,” said Yevgeniy V Afansyev, a former counselor at the Soviet embassy in Washington.

On orders from Moscow, Rogachev flew by helicopter from Saigon to Phnom Penh. At times his helicopter flew high above the treetops to avoid Khmer Rouge fire. Not long after crossing the Vietnamese border and entering Cambodia's airspace, Rogachev became apprehensive. He had expected to see a familiar landscape below: the rice paddies, buffaloes, and villages he knew from his years in China and his travels throughout Southeast Asia. Instead he saw what he said looked “like a moonscape.”

“From the helicopter I couldn't see people or livestock. Really, there were no living things. There was no smoke over the villages as in other Asian countries. There were just holes. Holes. Holes. Everywhere.”

The helicopter landed at Phnom Penh's Pochentong airport. Rogachev, a tall, fair Russian, was used to standing out in a crowd in Asia. But here he was instantly uncomfortable. He was one of the first foreign diplomats, other than the Vietnamese, to visit Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge defeat and see with few fetters what had become of the country during the previous four years. Certainly Rogachev was well briefed about the Khmer Rouge. Lately, his country had led the charge against Pol Pot, accusing him of horrible crimes. But the world had yet to understand how thoroughly the Khmer Rouge had destroyed the country and the people, and Rogachev was totally unprepared for the ruin and misery he was witnessing.

First, the Vietnamese were openly in charge of the country. It was a complete occupation. Driving in from the airport, Rogachev thought Phnom Penh looked less like a city than a battle scene. Signs of fighting were everywhere, and there was the stench and the dirt that accompany chaos and death. Nothing in the city seemed to be working, and Rogachev said to himself repeatedly, “What is this? This is not like the Southeast Asian cities I know, not Bangkok or Saigon.”

The Vietnamese took him to the one hotel in operation—the old Royale, or Phnom, now renamed Samaki or “Solidarity.” Slightly in shock, Rogachev completed the awkward formalities of signing in at the dilapidated hotel and decided to take care of a small, simple item of business first. The Soviet foreign ministry had asked him to inspect the old Soviet embassy that had been shut down four years earlier and give an estimate of the amount of work required to reopen it. Rogachev did not know that Pol Pot had used it as communist party headquarters.

He had no trouble finding the building—his escort knew the way—but he was unprepared for what he found. “Our embassy was a mess,” Rogachev said later. “It had no glass in the windows, everything was scattered about. In one office there was a big dry bloodstain and many marks on the walls. Someone had been shot there.”

He fled the scene of the execution and went outside, to the embassy gardens. But there he found something much worse: a new graveyard. “We had to plug our noses. It was a terrible, awful smell. We found corpses barely covered with earth. No one knew who these people were.”

The Soviet diplomat had stumbled upon one of the hundreds of as yet undiscovered execution sites around the country. During the last months of Pol Pot's rule, the old Soviet embassy had been used to torture and murder Cambodians summarily condemned to death by the Khmer Rouge. Later, the Soviets would be among the first foreigners to see the schools, pagodas, and open fields used to slaughter Cambodians. But that February afternoon, few details were known of these execution sites, and Rogachev stumbled out of the embassy compound horrified.

At sundown a dinner was held in honor of the visiting Soviet at the hotel in the outside garden. A table was set under a tree, and after their first day in this forsaken country, stricken with famine and disease, he did not expect a banquet. He was not disappointed. Rogachev glanced at the chipped crockery and the food covered with “thousands and thousands of flies” and moved on. Greeting him at the end of the table was Rogachev's Cambodian host, the new foreign minister named Hun Sen.

Rogachev shook hands with the young man. Rogachev knew his official political lineage in advance. Hun Sen claimed to be a former mid-ranking commander with the Khmer Rouge who had fled to Vietnam in 1977, both out of dissatisfaction with the degradation of the country under Pol Pot and out of fear that he and his fellow officers in the Eastern Zone were next on the list for execution. The five men were close enough to the border to outrun their would-be Khmer Rouge pursuers. Hun Sen had told his Vietnamese
military captors that he and four other men were part of a group who had been opponents of the Khmer Rouge. By late 1977, he and later Khmer Rouge defectors like Heng Samrin and Chea Sim became official political opponents, and it was through them that Vietnam created the front group called the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, in whose name it now occupied Cambodia. They were both the benefactors and the stooges of this dramatic turn of fortune.

Out of this group of defectors, the Vietnamese chose Hun Sen as foreign minister. The twenty-eight-year-old Cambodian communist soldier had no apparent qualifications for the job. His short adult life had been spent entirely in a military uniform. Since the age of sixteen, when he dropped out of a Phnom Penh high school and joined the Khmer Rouge movement, Hun Sen had gone from one battle to another, suffering five serious injuries in the chaotic, murderous revolution. He had grown up not only fighting under the worst of circumstances but having to navigate through political machinations that defeated some of the most gifted Khmer Rouge politicians. He lost his left eye in the final battle for Phnom Penh, which put him out of commission during the traumatic evacuation of Phnom Penh, allowed him to catch his breath and to rekindle a friendship with a Khmer Rouge nurse whom he asked to marry. Because he was a handicapped veteran, permission was granted, and he and Buon San Heang became husband and wife in one of the Khmer Rouge mass ceremonies, the thirteenth couple that day. “I was lucky,” he said, “because only men over thirty could marry then except the handicapped.”

They lived together, she had a child, and in 1977 he escaped just days ahead of his executioners. When he rejoined his wife after the Vietnamese occupation, he discovered that his first child had died while he was away.

Rogachev noted Hun Sen's obvious physical problems—that he was gaunt from the years of injuries and malnutrition and that the artificial eye in his left socket was ill-fitting and disconcerting. But after a short conversation the Russian forgot all that and concentrated on Hun Sen's mind and spirit. He had a very agile intellect and even more openly large ambition for himself and the country. Here, amid a people whose life force had been stunted by years of senseless violence and depravation, people who seemed incapable of following the simplest conversations, Rogachev found someone he could talk to, who was alive to the opportunities ahead of him. “I was impressed with him right away,” he said.

The two men sat in that squalid setting and began discussing how the Soviet Union could help Cambodia. Without the dull dreaminess of other
Cambodian leaders or their close-minded arrogance, Hun Sen was able to ask Rogachev a practical series of questions to help him figure out what to do next. Hun Sen had never traveled outside Cambodia, except for his recent brief stay in Vietnam. He barely knew the names of most foreign nations much less where they were and what they stood for. His intellectual grid was based on his rural upbringing and his coming of age as a soldier in the incomprehensible revolution of Cambodia. He had survived front-line duty in a war with no clear battle lines and routine B-52 bombings, and later he had survived his comrades' plots to kill him by concentrating entirely on matters at hand, unfazed by conflicting moralities.

So he listened carefully to Rogachev. “I witnessed this myself,” the Russian said. “Hun Sen was a very good student, a very good pupil.”

And he tried to decipher how each part fit into the whole. His exceedingly provincial background actually worked to his advantage. He had grown up in Kompong Cham, the same province where he was later stationed by the Khmer Rouge. Born in 1951, Hun Sen had been the much loved younger son of a large family and, in a sign of the esteem in which he was held, Hun Sen had been sent to the capital for a high school education. The family had little money, so he boarded at Wat Tveak Kavorn, a Buddhist temple near the Indra Devi College he attended. But by 1968 the Vietnam War and all its attendant dislocations invaded his life. A distant cousin, Niv Kien, enlisted Hun Sen to join the Khmer Rouge cause, and he started out as a young courier, going from the city to the countryside. But this cousin was arrested and Hun Sen got frightened. “I had to flee Phnom Penh and find a revolutionary base,” he said. In 1970 he joined the party and the revolution.